The current invention defines a new communication process using a Java ME (J2ME) application as a proxy between a smart card on a mobile device (whether an SIM, embedded secure element, detachable secure SD, secure MMC, or any other smart card form factor) and web based application server, which is supporting SOAP messaging, to provide greater efficiency and auto recovery functionality. This process contains a protocol allowing adaptive fragmentation of data packet, optimized message format and auto recovery functionalities for a Java ME® (JME) application to communicate with an application server over the air via HTTP or HTTPS. The application server, which can understand the protocol translates to another message protocol and route it to the end point host. The end point message can be proprietary XML or open standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message. The protocol provides auto recovery by re-sending the last message over again whenever there is no response message received within a certain period of time. It has applications notably in the communication industries. A system is also described.
More and more portable devices with smart cards are in use. These devices are intended to communicate with operators on a host over a network. The communication between the device and the network is done through a server generally called a channel gateway. Some of these devices run Java ME® application and this is usually done with limited resource in terms of memory and processing power. Moreover, the communication technology used in the device is slow and possibly unreliable with realistic speeds up to 56 Kbps.
As the application server moves towards web services oriented architecture, the default messaging protocol to communicate with the server is a SOAP message over HTTP or HTTPS. However, the parsing and serializing of SOAP message requires much more processing and memory than a binary message. Moreover, the size of the message is much larger than a binary message.
As stated above, a SOA smart card management system encapsulates APDU messages in SOAP and transmits them over a wired or wireless network. For a Java ME application running on a mobile device with GPRS® or 3G® wireless connection to communicate with the system, the device requires bigger memory for temporary storage of SOAP and a faster processor to parse and extract the APDU data out of the SOAP message. The data transmitted over the air could be restricted in size per connection by mobile operator.
So, there is a cap on the data transfer size controlled at the gateway of the mobile operator. The packet data exchanged between the device and the server is required to divide into smaller packets which is lower than the cap size so that the packet can be transmitted smoothly over the operator network. The packet shall be determined by cell location in which the device registered on.
Hence, to overcome this, on-demand adaptive adjustment of the data size per connection is defined.
The transport of APDU data over time is a non-guaranteed reliable connection. Beside that, the underlying JVM runs on the device may not properly garbage collect the resources within certain period of time, hence it may leads to the subsequent open connection operation being blocked.
The current invention is intended to overcome such problems and to provide benefits which will be apparent from the description. Before this invention, the communication process between a smart card on a mobile device (such as an SIM) and an application server was via SIM application Toolkit commands and SMS (short messaging). But with this invention, which utilizes a gateway and a proxy of Java ME (J2ME) application on the mobile device, the delivery of more APDU commands to different types of smart card form factors on the mobile device is made more efficient and stable, thus overcoming wireless network limitations.